Software

At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some new Linux virtualization benchmarks. Being compared is the performance of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to that of HandelSpielVM on the Linux 3.0 kernel with a stock Ubuntu 11.10 for both the host and guest.

Here's the second to last batch of the 2011 GNOME User Survey feedback. The last dump of the GNOME feedback will come in the next day or two so that we can then move onto publishing the rest of the results of this survey for the other questions.

LLVM 3.0 was released last week as a major update to this increasingly popular open-source compiler infrastructure. With the release of LLVM 3.0 proper also came major updates to the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and the DragonEgg GCC plug-in. In this article is a look at DragonEgg for LLVM 3.0 that plugs into GCC to replace its optimizers and code generators with those from LLVM.

The GNOME 2011 User Survey is about to end (the survey period was extended as I was out of the office the past two weeks), but here's the latest batch of one-thousand responses about the GNOME desktop. The survey responses in full from the other questions will be published soon.

To see how the GCC 4.7 release is shaping up, for your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of GCC 4.2 through a recent GCC 4.7 development snapshot. GCC 4.7 will be released next March/April with many significant changes, so here's some numbers to find out if you can expect to see any broad performance improvements. Making things more interesting, the benchmarks are being done from an AMD FX-8150 to allow you to see how the performance of this latest-generation AMD processor architecture is affected going back by GNU Compiler Collection releases long before this open-source compiler had any optimizations in place.

Among many other enhancements and alterations, the Linux 3.2 kernel, the Btrfs file-system has some "pretty beefy" changes. Btrfs in Linux 3.2 merges in some long-standing Btrfs branches with new capabilities.

The Open64 5.0 compiler was released earlier this month with many changes, among the prominently noted items were greater optimizations for AMD's Bulldozer CPUs. In this article is a first-look at the Open64 5.0 compiler performance compared to its earlier release, as tested on an AMD FX-8150 eight-core "Bulldozer" processor.